I know of no government guarranty to wind power such as this, can you provide a link?
I think that you misread me. That's the renewable energy subsidy if we gave wind power the same 'subsidies' that are 'given' to nuclear power. This system was set up by the Price-Anderson act
Many people have battery banks to store the energy their solar, wind, or hybrid systems generate.
Don't get me wrong, but while people do it, it's not globally economic to do so. Most people who do these systems do so to avoid the expense of running line power to them. Meanwhile they do things like run special refridgerators and use hydrocarbon method of accomplishing tasks such as heating their home, water, and cooking. For example, solar power will make sense much more quickly in Sunny california with high electricity costs than ND with it's cheap electricity.
Magazines like Home Power show just how people are doing it. Fact is is more and more people are going Off the Grid. And because they are off the grid they have to store energy in battery banks. It may seem expensive to setup such a system but the payback period can be as little as a few years
Fact is you only have a few years to make back the investment because the batteries degrade, eventually needing replacement. If I set up a tiny system, conserve like all get out, sure it might be cheaper for me.
and that doesn't take in inflation, the cost of electricity going up. Once the system's cost has been recovered what's left is "free energy". Even the costs of maintance is less than the cost of electricity used if bought from the power company.
Assuming you don't have to replace the batteries very often.
Ok this site has batteries inteneded for renewable resources for sale. The L-16HC seems to be the best deal, for the amp-hours. It's a 6 volt battery that has 420 amp-hours of capacity. That's 2520 watt/hours. Divided by it's cost of $288, that's $114 per kw/hour of capacity, and it's only rated for 3-6 years of 20% daily discharge.
The 4-KS-21P ends up costing $174 kw/h of capacity, but it's rated for 3.2k 50% cycles. Or about 10 years. 3.2k of 50% cycles(.5kw/h produced)At 8 cents/kwh, it'd make available 1.6k kw/hs. On the other hand, at 8 cents/kwh(my local electric rate), that'd be $128 of electricty. Even if I got my solar panels/wind turbine for free, it'd be cheaper for me to buy power from the grid during non-usage!
Feel free to check other batteries if you want, but that's what I came up with.
I don't really care about how hazardous the materials handled are as long as they're handled in a safe mannor and not let out in the enviroment. Not having heard about uranium hexafloride releases or deaths, I'll assume they have that figured out. Next problem?
As for being carbon free, well, by your yardstick not even solar or wind would be carbon free because coal was used to power the plants making the metals, hydrocarbons were burned by the trucks transporting the materials on site, and gasoline or diesel is burned by workers maintaining the sites. Still, shutting down a bunch of coal plants would get rid of a significant amount of carbon. Thus the Kyoto comment(which doesn't require zero carbon stuff, just reductions).
There is ridiculous amounts of bullshit and name calling and even outright confidence tricks surrounding renewable power as well. Spend a little time considering the heavy subsidies for wind and solar, as well as what significant levels of renewable power can do to our power grid, given that they produce power when the conditions are right, not when we need it.
and it doesn't help that a lot of the worlds plants are dual use compromises to get weapon material in addition to electricity and not be good at either.
I'll agree with this statement, which is why I said I'd build new design plants, which are set up for maximum safety and efficiency in producing electricity, not weapons-grade material. Remember how I said I'd shut down the old nuclear plants next?
Building a nuclear power plant is indeed an energy intensive process. So isn't building a steel mill, sports stadium, coal power plant. Making solar panels is energy intensive. This page says that a nuclear power plant repays it's energy costs for construction, deconstruction, and waste disposal in 3 months.
On to cost: First, remember I was making an EO comment. As an EO I have the power to pay cash, conscript labor, cut through red tape(or people if necessary), etc... Also, while I hate coal with a passion, I view nuclear, wind, and solar more equally.
Let's approach it from the supply side. A 1GW power plant of the nuclear variety will produce, on average, 8.5 Billion kw/hours of electricity a year with the US average load factor* for nuclear power plants of 97%. At about 8 cents per kw/h, that's $680 million in electricity. A $2 billion 1GW nuclear reactor would take about four years to pay itself off(discounting other expenses).
Costs to contruct:
Nuclear Power: $2000/kw capacity (97% load factor, fuel costs relativly insignificant) effective: $2062 Solar Power: $2000/kw best new tech, grid connected(50% in optimal climate) effective: $4000 Wind: $2000/kw (sites don't want to post the cost, maintenance of turbines still required LF:35%), effective: $5714 Coal: $1400/kw (75-85% load factor, but significant health and emissions, as well as fuel costs) NG/Oil/Diesel/etc: fuel costs more significant than generator costs.
And I'd want the government to stop subsidizing the nuclear power industry along with the petroleum industry, at least help alternative energy to the same degree
Ok, we'll subsidize 'alternative energy' to the same degree as we subsidize the nuclear power industry. Here's how we do it: We cut all subsidies for building alternative power installations, such as the 1.8 cents/kwh wind credit, to zero and charge a mandatory 'disposal' fee per kw/hour of energy produced with the agreement to take care of the waste. I know alternative power normally doesn't generate any, but then, neither has the government actually taken any waste away in the nuclear power industry. Oh, and the government will agree to only hold the wind power industry responsable for the first 10 billion dollars or so of damages, before which will be self covered, covered by private insurance, then a common pool for which all wind producers will have to have money in escrow before. Oh wait, was that not the subsidization you were thinking of?
Then there's a significant problem with 'renewable' energy sources like wind and solar in that they're not demand based. Basically, they produce power when they want to, not when people need power. You don't store electricity if you don't have to, because the storage systems are expensive. Therefore you need backup power capability, which substantially increases the costs of the 'green' power, because you essentially have to build double the capacity. Oh, and most standbys are either expensive NG or dirty coal.
*Load Factor, also known as the capacity factor, is the ratio between a power plant's actual production and theoretical maximum production. Nuclear power plants are generally the highest at 97%, as they shut down rarely and usually operate at 100%. Solar will never break 50%. Wind in england averages 25-35%.
That's why I specifically mentioned 'other efficient reactors'. Breeders can be used to make more fuel, so despite their safety issues are an important part of a long term nuclear power solution. We still have time though before we really have to worry about them.
I'm aware that there are safety concerns with breeder reactors, but I view the incident you talked about kinda like the TMI of breeder reactors. It was, after all, the first commercial breeder reactor, and it was a lousy 94 MW. Despite what you say, no nuclear explosion was possible, though a non-nuclear pressure explosion could have. Still, that's what the containment dome is for.
Along with the reproccessing facilities, I'd put the breeders(and not necessarily of the design requiring liquid sodium) in remote locations with overkill containment domes.
Clean, as in pollutants aren't released into the enviroment. Safe, as in we have designs that are proven redundantly safe Plentiful, as in known deposits are good for 500 years even without reprocessing, which would give us 20 times the power for the material.
Oh, and the same thing applies to uranium as 'peak oil' - as the price increases known reserves goes up, and surveying discovers more.
500 years of energy can seriously help tide us over until fusion does become a reality - which is likely at least 50-100 years away, the way it's going.
Why do you think I made the 'if I become an EO' comment? As an EO I'd be able to ship the NIMBYs off to the uranium mines for some bare-handed mining work.
You'd have to delete TMI from your radiation release example, because TMI had no appreciable levels of radiation released. At least according to all studies that don't assume that radiation was released, but somehow managed to avoid all the sensors placed around the plant.
But yeah, the NIMBYs are a big problem, especially as they consider the whole country as their backyard. They'd actually come from California to protest if somebody proposed building a nuclear reactor in North Dakota.
Not to mention that we have tons more of it around because we aren't reprocessing it and using it as fuel. If you use the plutonium in a reactor for power it's kinda difficult to form it into a bomb.
One funny thing is that we have rods approaching forty years old at this point.
While still radioactive, they've cooled considerably, to the point that you don't need to take as elaborate precautions to reprocess them, making it potentially much cheaper.
It shouldn't be difficult to set up the cooling pools/onsite storage to store the fuel rods fresh from the reactor for forty years before reprocessing. Think of it as an investment in the future.;)
It was banned by presidential order by Jimmy Carter in 1977 due to fears of reproccessing resulting in proliferation.
Still, reprocessing is going on today in France and Japan, at the least.
Like others said, the 'waste' sitting on site could be reprocessed to provide enough fuel and reduce the amount of waste to the point that Yucca mountain wouldn't be necessary.
Going with breeder reactors and other more efficient designs would be good too.
Personally, if I was the EO(Evil Overlord) of the USA, I'd institute a practice of reprocessing nuclear waste as well as a building program to replace all the coal plants with modern nuclear ones. Kyoto, eat my dust. After shutting down all the coal plants, I'd work on replacing the old nuclear ones.
A business with corruption doesn't run as efficiently as one without corruption. A corrupt business will have to worry about government investigations/convictions/fines, as well as the money it's corrupt officials funnel out of it, either into their or their crony's pockets.
It gets too bad the company can go under.
Personally, I think that we should see a lot more convictions with prison terms for CEOs and Execs who abuse their offices, as well as stockholders who pay a little more attention to what the company officers are doing.
From what I've read, it's more along the lines of foreign competition, union wages, and required emission control updates if they upgrade their plants that is keeping our metallurgic plants down.
Basically the plants can't afford to update because then they'd have to add all sorts of emission controls to stop them from polluting*. They aren't making much money because union wages are often literally 100 times what foreign plants pay their workers, putting the US plants at a disadvantage.
*My solution: Stop grandfathering, start fining or even paying for the mandated upgrades.
As Colaman said, you can't ignore customer preference in a free society. Heck, the way we wrote the regulations so tight for cars helped push consumers to SUVs and light trucks. You have to face it, there's generally a reason for somebody to pay an extra $10k for an SUV, and it's not always 'compensating'.
It's a fact of life that there are many SUV's out there. They're used for towing and heavy hauling even less than trucks are, they're filling the 'Van/Heavy passanger car' role. Great for the familiy that needs more cargo space than the average econo-box provides.
How's this for opportunity cost: Because the 40 mpg car doesn't meet all my requirements a sufficient amount of the time, I'd still have to buy a larger vehicle for those weekly trips where the vehicle is stuffed full.
Situation 1: $12k econobox for commuting plus $30k 'beast' that gets half the gas milage. Call it 40/20. Situation 2: I straight out buy the $30k beast and use it for commuting, even though I end up not using it's full potential 80% of the time.
I'll figure out Sit 2 first because it's easier. Let's call the commute 20 miles. Round trip in the beast will use 2 gallons of gasoline and cost ~$5 of gas. 50 weeks of 5 days is $1250 of gasoline.
Hmm... The econobox is only going to save me $625 in gasoline a year. It'd take 20 years to pay for the econobox with gasoline savings, not couting any capital costs* or interest, extra insurance(probably be more than $600/year alone), taxes, etc...
Now, econoboxes do make sense for many people as a second vehicle in a dual income family or families without children, as well as many singles or retired folks.
*IE the money I'd have made if I instead took the money and put it into interest bearing investments.
Still, I wonder sometimes if it might be worth it to put a socket system on them and a big extension cord system so you can provide line power to them when they're accellerating out of the yard. Say for the first kilometer. They still wouldn't be up to full speed, but you could probably save quite a few gallons of diesel.
As others pointed out, there's actually a natural tendency for them to match up, even if one is pushing slightly harder or softer than the other. The one pulling harder experiences a little more drag, the one pulling softer experiences a little less. Both are effectivly pulling the same load, so the load moves with the average pull.
What electric would let you do is again, decouple the wheels and the engine so you can run the engine in it's optimal range.
Umm, no. Locomotives don't do any stop & go driving, don't have a large battery pack, can't go an inch without the diesel engine running, etc.
While lacking a battery pack, a locomotive is still 'hybrid' in that it has both a diesel engine and electric motors. There are car type hybrids out there right now that can't go an inch without the engine running, with the battery system only providing a power boost, allowing a smaller engine to be used for the performance. Even then, I read an article about 4 months ago that pointed out that they're starting to build true hybrid locomotives.
The nature of a hybrid the size of a locomotive actually allows more efficiency than a transmission of sufficient strength to move the train. See my point about larger electric motors being more efficient. A locomotive of course has some really big ones. That and you can operate and tune the diesel engine for maximum efficiency because you don't have to worry about the RPM range of a convential gearbox mechanical connect system.
As for hooking multiple locomotives together, there's really no reason that you couldn't do that with direct-drive, it's just a bit easier because of the decoupling of speed/engine RPM and force.
The version of my thinking here is that with or without regulation, "the market" will always be subject to corruption and collusion.
Have you ever paid attention to government? Some days I think that government exists to pull the corrupt in. The government is the biggest source of corruption going.
In the business world there are at least some controls against corruption, as a business that gets too corrupt ends up out of business.
Don't forget there's also the question of 'Who has the most to gain?'. If you think about it a moment, you realize that SUVs, being larger vehicles than a car, stand to save a larger amount of gasoline than a small car. Going from 12mpg to 30 mpg will save more gasoline than 30 to 40 mpg. The larger vehicle also has more space to put the necessary equipment because many of the parts will be about the same size whether it's in a Honda civic or Ford Escape. Oh, and electric motors tend to be more efficient the larger they are, so you can gain a few percentage points there. Add in the systems end up costing less as a percentage of the cost of the vehicle as a whole, and I wonder why they didn't come out with hybrid SUVs sooner.
Basically, it actually makes more sense to put hybrid systems into SUV's than compact cars. It's part of the reason that locomotives have been effectivly hybrids for years(major reason is the elimination of the transmission, of course).
As a power user, I'd be willing to pay about the cost of a hard drive for a flash drive that's large enough to take my OS and program files. I'll do the custom install to have my user directories and data files on the hard drive I'd also install. That way all the program files and DLLs that don't often change(despite microsoft's best efforts) are on the fast, solid state flash, and the user directories and cache and size intensive files like music and video are on the cheap mass storage hard drive.
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I know of no government guarranty to wind power such as this, can you provide a link?
I think that you misread me. That's the renewable energy subsidy if we gave wind power the same 'subsidies' that are 'given' to nuclear power. This system was set up by the Price-Anderson act
Many people have battery banks to store the energy their solar, wind, or hybrid systems generate.
Don't get me wrong, but while people do it, it's not globally economic to do so. Most people who do these systems do so to avoid the expense of running line power to them. Meanwhile they do things like run special refridgerators and use hydrocarbon method of accomplishing tasks such as heating their home, water, and cooking. For example, solar power will make sense much more quickly in Sunny california with high electricity costs than ND with it's cheap electricity.
Magazines like Home Power show just how people are doing it. Fact is is more and more people are going Off the Grid. And because they are off the grid they have to store energy in battery banks. It may seem expensive to setup such a system but the payback period can be as little as a few years
Fact is you only have a few years to make back the investment because the batteries degrade, eventually needing replacement.
If I set up a tiny system, conserve like all get out, sure it might be cheaper for me.
and that doesn't take in inflation, the cost of electricity going up. Once the system's cost has been recovered what's left is "free energy". Even the costs of maintance is less than the cost of electricity used if bought from the power company.
Assuming you don't have to replace the batteries very often.
Ok this site has batteries inteneded for renewable resources for sale. The L-16HC seems to be the best deal, for the amp-hours. It's a 6 volt battery that has 420 amp-hours of capacity. That's 2520 watt/hours. Divided by it's cost of $288, that's $114 per kw/hour of capacity, and it's only rated for 3-6 years of 20% daily discharge.
The 4-KS-21P ends up costing $174 kw/h of capacity, but it's rated for 3.2k 50% cycles. Or about 10 years. 3.2k of 50% cycles(.5kw/h produced)At 8 cents/kwh, it'd make available 1.6k kw/hs. On the other hand, at 8 cents/kwh(my local electric rate), that'd be $128 of electricty. Even if I got my solar panels/wind turbine for free, it'd be cheaper for me to buy power from the grid during non-usage!
Feel free to check other batteries if you want, but that's what I came up with.
It's called 'take an economics class' or 'read an economics textbook'.
I don't really care about how hazardous the materials handled are as long as they're handled in a safe mannor and not let out in the enviroment. Not having heard about uranium hexafloride releases or deaths, I'll assume they have that figured out. Next problem?
As for being carbon free, well, by your yardstick not even solar or wind would be carbon free because coal was used to power the plants making the metals, hydrocarbons were burned by the trucks transporting the materials on site, and gasoline or diesel is burned by workers maintaining the sites. Still, shutting down a bunch of coal plants would get rid of a significant amount of carbon. Thus the Kyoto comment(which doesn't require zero carbon stuff, just reductions).
There is ridiculous amounts of bullshit and name calling and even outright confidence tricks surrounding renewable power as well. Spend a little time considering the heavy subsidies for wind and solar, as well as what significant levels of renewable power can do to our power grid, given that they produce power when the conditions are right, not when we need it.
and it doesn't help that a lot of the worlds plants are dual use compromises to get weapon material in addition to electricity and not be good at either.
I'll agree with this statement, which is why I said I'd build new design plants, which are set up for maximum safety and efficiency in producing electricity, not weapons-grade material. Remember how I said I'd shut down the old nuclear plants next?
Building a nuclear power plant is indeed an energy intensive process. So isn't building a steel mill, sports stadium, coal power plant. Making solar panels is energy intensive. This page says that a nuclear power plant repays it's energy costs for construction, deconstruction, and waste disposal in 3 months.
On to cost: First, remember I was making an EO comment. As an EO I have the power to pay cash, conscript labor, cut through red tape(or people if necessary), etc... Also, while I hate coal with a passion, I view nuclear, wind, and solar more equally.
Let's approach it from the supply side. A 1GW power plant of the nuclear variety will produce, on average, 8.5 Billion kw/hours of electricity a year with the US average load factor* for nuclear power plants of 97%. At about 8 cents per kw/h, that's $680 million in electricity. A $2 billion 1GW nuclear reactor would take about four years to pay itself off(discounting other expenses).
Costs to contruct:
Nuclear Power: $2000/kw capacity (97% load factor, fuel costs relativly insignificant) effective: $2062
Solar Power: $2000/kw best new tech, grid connected(50% in optimal climate) effective: $4000
Wind: $2000/kw (sites don't want to post the cost, maintenance of turbines still required LF:35%), effective: $5714
Coal: $1400/kw (75-85% load factor, but significant health and emissions, as well as fuel costs)
NG/Oil/Diesel/etc: fuel costs more significant than generator costs.
And I'd want the government to stop subsidizing the nuclear power industry along with the petroleum industry, at least help alternative energy to the same degree
Ok, we'll subsidize 'alternative energy' to the same degree as we subsidize the nuclear power industry. Here's how we do it: We cut all subsidies for building alternative power installations, such as the 1.8 cents/kwh wind credit, to zero and charge a mandatory 'disposal' fee per kw/hour of energy produced with the agreement to take care of the waste. I know alternative power normally doesn't generate any, but then, neither has the government actually taken any waste away in the nuclear power industry. Oh, and the government will agree to only hold the wind power industry responsable for the first 10 billion dollars or so of damages, before which will be self covered, covered by private insurance, then a common pool for which all wind producers will have to have money in escrow before. Oh wait, was that not the subsidization you were thinking of?
Then there's a significant problem with 'renewable' energy sources like wind and solar in that they're not demand based. Basically, they produce power when they want to, not when people need power. You don't store electricity if you don't have to, because the storage systems are expensive. Therefore you need backup power capability, which substantially increases the costs of the 'green' power, because you essentially have to build double the capacity. Oh, and most standbys are either expensive NG or dirty coal.
*Load Factor, also known as the capacity factor, is the ratio between a power plant's actual production and theoretical maximum production. Nuclear power plants are generally the highest at 97%, as they shut down rarely and usually operate at 100%. Solar will never break 50%. Wind in england averages 25-35%.
That's why I specifically mentioned 'other efficient reactors'. Breeders can be used to make more fuel, so despite their safety issues are an important part of a long term nuclear power solution. We still have time though before we really have to worry about them.
I'm aware that there are safety concerns with breeder reactors, but I view the incident you talked about kinda like the TMI of breeder reactors. It was, after all, the first commercial breeder reactor, and it was a lousy 94 MW. Despite what you say, no nuclear explosion was possible, though a non-nuclear pressure explosion could have. Still, that's what the containment dome is for.
Along with the reproccessing facilities, I'd put the breeders(and not necessarily of the design requiring liquid sodium) in remote locations with overkill containment domes.
Stealing it out of an active reactor would be even more difficult and mostly self-defeating.
It wouldn't be hard to reprocess the waste and keep it secure. I'd put the plutonium power plant with the reprossessing facility in a secure area.
Clean, as in pollutants aren't released into the enviroment.
Safe, as in we have designs that are proven redundantly safe
Plentiful, as in known deposits are good for 500 years even without reprocessing, which would give us 20 times the power for the material.
Oh, and the same thing applies to uranium as 'peak oil' - as the price increases known reserves goes up, and surveying discovers more.
500 years of energy can seriously help tide us over until fusion does become a reality - which is likely at least 50-100 years away, the way it's going.
Why do you think I made the 'if I become an EO' comment? As an EO I'd be able to ship the NIMBYs off to the uranium mines for some bare-handed mining work.
You'd have to delete TMI from your radiation release example, because TMI had no appreciable levels of radiation released. At least according to all studies that don't assume that radiation was released, but somehow managed to avoid all the sensors placed around the plant.
But yeah, the NIMBYs are a big problem, especially as they consider the whole country as their backyard. They'd actually come from California to protest if somebody proposed building a nuclear reactor in North Dakota.
Heh...
Looking at some of your other comments, you might like some of my other views. Still, there would be many who'd absolutely hate my plans as EO.
Not to mention that we have tons more of it around because we aren't reprocessing it and using it as fuel. If you use the plutonium in a reactor for power it's kinda difficult to form it into a bomb.
You could fit 500 of those rocks, spread apart, within a couple football field sized areas.
In the realm of idustrial warehousing and storage, that's nothing.
One funny thing is that we have rods approaching forty years old at this point.
;)
While still radioactive, they've cooled considerably, to the point that you don't need to take as elaborate precautions to reprocess them, making it potentially much cheaper.
It shouldn't be difficult to set up the cooling pools/onsite storage to store the fuel rods fresh from the reactor for forty years before reprocessing. Think of it as an investment in the future.
It was banned by presidential order by Jimmy Carter in 1977 due to fears of reproccessing resulting in proliferation.
Still, reprocessing is going on today in France and Japan, at the least.
Like others said, the 'waste' sitting on site could be reprocessed to provide enough fuel and reduce the amount of waste to the point that Yucca mountain wouldn't be necessary.
Going with breeder reactors and other more efficient designs would be good too.
Personally, if I was the EO(Evil Overlord) of the USA, I'd institute a practice of reprocessing nuclear waste as well as a building program to replace all the coal plants with modern nuclear ones. Kyoto, eat my dust. After shutting down all the coal plants, I'd work on replacing the old nuclear ones.
Result: Clean, safe, plentiful electricity, reduced emissions, etc...
Simple enough. And no, I don't have any links.
A business with corruption doesn't run as efficiently as one without corruption. A corrupt business will have to worry about government investigations/convictions/fines, as well as the money it's corrupt officials funnel out of it, either into their or their crony's pockets.
It gets too bad the company can go under.
Personally, I think that we should see a lot more convictions with prison terms for CEOs and Execs who abuse their offices, as well as stockholders who pay a little more attention to what the company officers are doing.
From what I've read, it's more along the lines of foreign competition, union wages, and required emission control updates if they upgrade their plants that is keeping our metallurgic plants down.
Basically the plants can't afford to update because then they'd have to add all sorts of emission controls to stop them from polluting*. They aren't making much money because union wages are often literally 100 times what foreign plants pay their workers, putting the US plants at a disadvantage.
*My solution: Stop grandfathering, start fining or even paying for the mandated upgrades.
Enron is the latest big example, though it ended up surviving.
No, it's called a business with too much corruption can't compete with a business without it. The whole business goes under.
I'll admit, I pulled the numbers out of the air.
The ford escape is rated 23 mpg city, the hybrid at 36.
43.5 - 27.8
That's a 13 mpg improvement. Over a thousand miles you'll save 15.7 gallons, on average.
The honda civic is 30mpg vs 49. It'll save you 'only' 12.9 gallons over a thosand miles.
There, real world numbers. Not 100% accurate, at least until the new milage tests are published, but should be similar.
As Colaman said, you can't ignore customer preference in a free society. Heck, the way we wrote the regulations so tight for cars helped push consumers to SUVs and light trucks. You have to face it, there's generally a reason for somebody to pay an extra $10k for an SUV, and it's not always 'compensating'.
It's a fact of life that there are many SUV's out there. They're used for towing and heavy hauling even less than trucks are, they're filling the 'Van/Heavy passanger car' role. Great for the familiy that needs more cargo space than the average econo-box provides.
How's this for opportunity cost: Because the 40 mpg car doesn't meet all my requirements a sufficient amount of the time, I'd still have to buy a larger vehicle for those weekly trips where the vehicle is stuffed full.
Situation 1: $12k econobox for commuting plus $30k 'beast' that gets half the gas milage. Call it 40/20.
Situation 2: I straight out buy the $30k beast and use it for commuting, even though I end up not using it's full potential 80% of the time.
I'll figure out Sit 2 first because it's easier. Let's call the commute 20 miles. Round trip in the beast will use 2 gallons of gasoline and cost ~$5 of gas. 50 weeks of 5 days is $1250 of gasoline.
Hmm... The econobox is only going to save me $625 in gasoline a year. It'd take 20 years to pay for the econobox with gasoline savings, not couting any capital costs* or interest, extra insurance(probably be more than $600/year alone), taxes, etc...
Now, econoboxes do make sense for many people as a second vehicle in a dual income family or families without children, as well as many singles or retired folks.
*IE the money I'd have made if I instead took the money and put it into interest bearing investments.
Which is why they don't put batteries in them.
Still, I wonder sometimes if it might be worth it to put a socket system on them and a big extension cord system so you can provide line power to them when they're accellerating out of the yard. Say for the first kilometer. They still wouldn't be up to full speed, but you could probably save quite a few gallons of diesel.
As others pointed out, there's actually a natural tendency for them to match up, even if one is pushing slightly harder or softer than the other. The one pulling harder experiences a little more drag, the one pulling softer experiences a little less. Both are effectivly pulling the same load, so the load moves with the average pull.
What electric would let you do is again, decouple the wheels and the engine so you can run the engine in it's optimal range.
Umm, no. Locomotives don't do any stop & go driving, don't have a large battery pack, can't go an inch without the diesel engine running, etc.
While lacking a battery pack, a locomotive is still 'hybrid' in that it has both a diesel engine and electric motors. There are car type hybrids out there right now that can't go an inch without the engine running, with the battery system only providing a power boost, allowing a smaller engine to be used for the performance. Even then, I read an article about 4 months ago that pointed out that they're starting to build true hybrid locomotives.
The nature of a hybrid the size of a locomotive actually allows more efficiency than a transmission of sufficient strength to move the train. See my point about larger electric motors being more efficient. A locomotive of course has some really big ones. That and you can operate and tune the diesel engine for maximum efficiency because you don't have to worry about the RPM range of a convential gearbox mechanical connect system.
As for hooking multiple locomotives together, there's really no reason that you couldn't do that with direct-drive, it's just a bit easier because of the decoupling of speed/engine RPM and force.
The version of my thinking here is that with or without regulation, "the market" will always be subject to corruption and collusion.
Have you ever paid attention to government? Some days I think that government exists to pull the corrupt in. The government is the biggest source of corruption going.
In the business world there are at least some controls against corruption, as a business that gets too corrupt ends up out of business.
Don't forget there's also the question of 'Who has the most to gain?'. If you think about it a moment, you realize that SUVs, being larger vehicles than a car, stand to save a larger amount of gasoline than a small car. Going from 12mpg to 30 mpg will save more gasoline than 30 to 40 mpg. The larger vehicle also has more space to put the necessary equipment because many of the parts will be about the same size whether it's in a Honda civic or Ford Escape. Oh, and electric motors tend to be more efficient the larger they are, so you can gain a few percentage points there. Add in the systems end up costing less as a percentage of the cost of the vehicle as a whole, and I wonder why they didn't come out with hybrid SUVs sooner.
Basically, it actually makes more sense to put hybrid systems into SUV's than compact cars. It's part of the reason that locomotives have been effectivly hybrids for years(major reason is the elimination of the transmission, of course).
I'll have to agree with this.
As a power user, I'd be willing to pay about the cost of a hard drive for a flash drive that's large enough to take my OS and program files. I'll do the custom install to have my user directories and data files on the hard drive I'd also install. That way all the program files and DLLs that don't often change(despite microsoft's best efforts) are on the fast, solid state flash, and the user directories and cache and size intensive files like music and video are on the cheap mass storage hard drive.